Verklempt Over Klimt (Again)

On Thursday, I went to check on the Golden Girl at the Neue Galerie. She wasn't happy.

That's because Adele Bloch-Bauer was forced to stare across the room at a decidedly pedestrian portrait by Richard Gerstl. She also shared her gallery with two Schieles and three clocks, instead of the entire roomful of paintings by her friend and portraitist, Gustav Klimt, as had been promised. The Neue Galerie's three Klimt sketches of Adele, which were originally shown in the next gallery when she arrived at the the premises, are now nowhere in evidence. But three Klimt paintings do help to keep Adele company.

The current arrangement is at variance with what Ronald Lauder had told me at the press preview last July, when he introduced Adele to her adoring public, along with the four other Klimts owned by the Bloch-Bauer heirs (and later sold at Christie's).

As I wrote in July:

[Lauder] vowed that "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" would remain on permanent view in a room that would always be devoted solely to the work of Gustav Klimt. If Lauder is frustrated in his desire to acquire the four other Bloch-Bauer Klimts, Adele will not lack for suitable companionship: The Neue Galerie has on hand eight other works by that artist, he said.

At the bookstore, I purchased the 96-page book recently published by the Neue Galerie about its "Mona Lisa," and found that it was almost entirely about the painting's history of ownership and display. Only two pages of text were devoted to the painting itself.

Without any reference to them in the text, the book also publishes full-page reproductions of "The Dancer" (owned by Lauder and now displayed with Adele) and "The Kiss," arguably Klimt's most famous painting. But, in a strange omission for a museum catalogue, the entry for "The Kiss" lacks any reference to its owner, the Belvedere Gallery, Vienna, which also owned the Bloch-Bauer Klimts until Maria Altmann successfully claimed them as having been improperly expropriated from her family by the Nazis.

Now that the excitement over the $135-million (more or less) acquisition of Adele has died down, so has the Neue Galerie's attendance (if my experience on Thursday afternoon was an accurate indication). As before, its pastry-rich Viennese café is by far its most popular room.

All this may change once the current Josef Hoffmann exhibition is supplanted by a van Gogh show.